Monday, March 5, 2007

Pyxides brainstorm: generic 'fold explorer'

I posted on the pyxides mailing list a prototype of a 'fold explorer'. A fold explorer is different from a class explorer as it shows the folding hierarchy of a document as a tree. Why? The aim is to use the internal power of Scintilla as much as possible. Scintilla supports 78 languages and a lot of them with folding. So the fold explorer enables any scintilla based editor to immediately support a whole range of languages. The fold explorer is also able to detect the start and end line of a node. If you right click any item in the tree, it will select the corresponding source. So later it should be possible with drag and drop items in a tree to reorganise your code. (Like in Leo, but without comments.) Now it uses 'picasso', a random style colorizer. For more information read the this thread on the pyxides mailing list. (Join the mailing list!)

Does anyone know how with python I could dynamically retrieve if a language support folding? That is the last missing piece.

This screenshot shows how it parses its own python source:

Rob McMullen shows how it parses a C++ file:

Here is the source code if you want to try it out for yourself. You need to have wxPython installed to run it. It is a nice demo if you want to play around with scintilla on python. I am open to any improvements, remarks or feedback.